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Notes -
Techno-pessimism as Agency-Depletion
Note: This is an exploration of what techno-pessimism feels like. I don't think there's an argument I'm making here. Perhaps it's more a reflection on how deep my techno-optimism goes that it's so difficult for me to entertain the idea of techno-pessimism. The connection to the culture war is that techno-pessimism seems to be deeply embedded in the political dialogue of both the left and the right.
Francis Fukuyama, in his 1992 classic "The End of History", spends a few pages describing techno-pessimism. It's been a while, but I think he put it as a belief that technology doesn't solve man's problems and may, in fact, make them worse. The flavor we're experiencing now has its source in the meat grinder trenches of WW1 when people were confronted by a mechanized, assembly-line conflict that was optimized for turning real live humans into ground meat.
For a long time, I didn't give this idea much thought. It was a useful label for a cluster of ideas I'd come upon time and again; a useful bucket to put people in to better understand them, nothing. But today, I read a piece that triggered all my "angry uninformed person ranting on the Internet" alarms, and instead of closing the tab, I spent some precious work-time to read it.
At the end, I was blown away. Not by any new points or ideas, but by being, for the first time ever, shown what techno-pessimism looks like from the inside. Suddenly, these two words stopped being merely a label, but also a lens through which to view the world. And I'm still shocked by seeing something so completely alien to my own perception.
I write code for a living. I have a general idea of how computers work and how different types of software works: payments processing, flight controls, video games, social media, VR, point-of-sale systems, etc. I also licked a little bit of physics and information theory, so I kind of see how all the machinery around us operates, at least on vague level. In the world, I feel... comfortable. I can fix a change a door lock, fix a leaky faucet, install an outlet, change a car tire, etc. It's all just machines of different sorts.
I hope this doesn't sound like bragging. I'm no genius. I can't fix most things and I'm more than happy to hire an expert when I can. I don't understand how most things work. Just enough to get the big picture, the relationships, the constraints.
Reading this the above linked blog post showed me a world where I know non of this. A world where I have some vague ideas about simple things like a squeaky hinge and the like, but anything above it is black magic. I mean, computers have inserted them into every facet of our lives. They record, update, store, delete, connect, calculate everything about us: our bank accounts, our working hours, our taxes, our retirement funds. The distance to the store, how busy a coffee place is, how to send flowers to your mother on Mother's day. Even if you're relatively disconnected, over half the world's population is plugged in; over 3bn people have Facebook accounts. TikTok has 1bn users; so even if you're disconnected, the majority of the people around you are plugged in, dancing to the rhythms created by man and machine together.
That's a terrifying. I can't imagine the frustration this guy has to feel. He can't troubleshoot his router, apart from pushing a paperclip into the little hole to reset everything. He can't make his own website (that doesn't look like templated shit). He can't figure out the right steps to get the car computer to reboot correctly after the battery ran out of power. Jesus, the sheer alienation must be terrifying--you can't really affect your immediate environment in any meaningful way. You're at the mercy of these beeping, monitoring, distracting machines all around you.
Now I understand that, perhaps, WW1 was the moment when people realized they built a grand machine that they only pretend to control. A machine with tendrils leading into every house, every room, every other person. And while in the first half of the 20th century any clever farm boy was likely able to mess around with a car, this isn't true today. There's a lot of layers of abstraction. So many interconnected systems. (Though I believe that taking a beginners course in programming would dispell like 80% of ignorance about machines).
How much agency is lost because of the aggregate effects of modern technology? Sure, the world of yesteryear wasn't some primitive utopia. But even within the strict confines of tradition and feudalism people had agency in the little things. Now, people like the author of that blog post I read are left without even the little things--their "smart" coffee machine will calls the cops if he tries to insert off-brand coffee pods into it.
You aren't wrong that we don't all have knowledge of how to deal with car problems, or how to use file systems or whatever. But I'd point out that we build things often precisely so we don't have to think about these things.
Sure, there's an argument to be made that if you don't have the knowledge to do something, you don't have the agency to do those things. But nothing stops you from trying to learn in the first place. It's not as if car manuals are extinct and you can only fix a car if you have a college degree (some work requires special tools, but that's not the same thing).
On the other hand, you know what the internet gave people the agency to do? Organize with like-minded people at a speed and scale never before imagined. Like, just look at video game modding. There's many, many people in the modding communities for many different games, and they'd never have been able to have the success they did if the internet withered away.
Or look at the power of social media! Lowering the cost of speaking on the nominally same stage as world leaders has proliferated the functional freedom of expression, even if it brought other problems associated with speech more than technology.
Technology can reduce agency, but it can also increase it, and I've seen far too many people concerned for the latter than the former in a real "the grass is greener" fashion, where they ignore the bountiful amounts of agency they have.
Twitter doesn't have to be a place where you only see people fight. Facebook doesn't have to be a place where you only see politics. You can do a great deal more. You just have to be willing to try in the first place.
Yeah, totally! What I was getting at is that if this digital world feels foreign or "wrong" to you (or the author of that blog post), you might lock yourself out from all of this.
I'm an optimist. I see all of these amazing things happening. People finding each other, coming together, creating something cool and fun. Sometimes, even useful. I'm glad that many more people today find value in the Web compared to ten or twenty years ago.
So apparently there are many optimists out there, but perhaps we don't hear too much from them because they're busy modding, learning, sharing instead of ranting at how bad everything is.
I too am a professional software guy and nerd-from-birth much like yourself, and I basically agree with the emotional thrust of the Kriss piece. I'm not sure why you think his attitude comes from ignorance of how things work; you simply assert this as being self evident. I've been helping to build the shit machine for the past 20 years and I can see quite clearly what I've done.
I'm with you. I've been locked into the technophagus practically since birth, and everything in that piece has resonated strongly with my own waning interest in the Internet. The past year-or-two for me has been demarcated by an increasing desire to withdraw from online interactions and disillusion with big platforms inevitably turning to shit. Hell, even Google Search these days feels like a cheap advertising gimmick - nowadays, if I have a question I need answered, I use the Reddit site search instead of google.. because that way I find responses written by humans instead of soulless, mindless auto-generated "blog posts".
In a way, it is my understanding of technology that precisely is what makes it so awful for me. Because I know what technology is capable of. And instead, I see it used for.... this. Another skinner box designed to make humans miserable. I'm sick of it and want it to die, for the real life to be revived.
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